What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does.

I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.

What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.

In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.

Every possible opinion is authored about everything. What's going to eventually happen is someone will look back on this period and have to sift through it. The overwhelming majority of those opinions are going to be ignored, because if every opinion is being offered, really no opinion is being offered.

It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.